That was just their excuse for having stolen all his belongings, his house, his wife, and sold off his children as slaves.
It was apparently a common expression, because they used it several times to the point of it being weird. It remind me of when the MST3K guys watched a Gamera movie where the kid kept saying, “I dream of a world with no hunger, no disease, and no traffic accidents!” “What’s with this kid and traffic accidents?”